Sergio Fernandez

Performance Regimes Amidst Governance Complexity

Much of the appeal of performance measurement is explained by its image as a simple and value-neutral way to monitor and improve government. But contemporary governance is characterized by complexity. Few public officials have the luxury of directly providing relatively simple services, the context in which performance regimes work best. Instead, they must work in the context of a disarticulated state, with policy problems that cross national boundaries and demand a multi-actor response. At the same time, traditional democratic values must be honored. This article examines the tensions between performance regimes and the complexity of modern governance, identifying implications and questions for research and practice.

Empowering Public Sector Employees to Improve Performance: Does It Work?

For more than a decade, public organizations have been adopting employee empowerment with the aim of improving performance and job satisfaction and promoting innovativeness. Our understanding of employee empowerment has been hindered by a dearth of empirical research on its uses and consequences in the public sector. Based on Bowen and Lawler’s conceptualization of employee empowerment, this study explores the link between various empowerment practices and perceived performance in federal agencies. It is found that empowerment practices aimed at providing employees with access to job-related knowledge and skills and at granting them discretion to change work processes have a positive and substantively significant influence on perceived performance. Other empowerment practices geared toward providing employees with information about goals and performance and offering them rewards based on performance are found, however, to have little bearing on perceptions of performance.

Understanding Contracting Performance An Empirical Analysis

This study explores the outcomes of contractual relationships between American local governments and private service providers. Researchers have approached the issue of contract administration and performance from a variety of theoretical perspectives, each providing its own insight into how to manage contractual relationships effectively. The analysis, which is based on a unique data set of more than 400 contractual relationships, focuses on the effects of contract monitoring, competition, and trust on contracting performance. The results of the analysis indicate that trust has an independent positive effect on overall contracting performance, as well as on eight specific dimensions of performance. In most of the models tested, monitoring and competition were not related to contracting performance. The relationship between monitoring and contracting performance appears to be more complex than previously thought, involving interactions with moderating variables.

Looking for Evidence of Public Employee Opposition to Privatization An Empirical Study With Implications for Practice

Contemporary public administration encompasses a wide variety of service delivery options. During the past two decades, privatization has become an increasingly utilized and legitimized approach. The perception that privatization poses a threat to public employment is seemingly widespread. Indeed, public sector unions often challenge the adoption of privatization programs. There is little evidence that individual rank-and-file public employees oppose privatization, however. In this study, the authors develop a multivariate model of support for privatization. Using a large-size public opinion data set from Georgia, the authors test the model and find that an individual’s employment in the public sector is a predictor of opposition to privatization. The authors then discuss the practical implications of public employee opposition to privatization. The authors conclude with a discussion of ways for reducing such opposition.

Under what Conditions do Public Managers Favor and Pursue Organizational Change

Managerial leaders play a prominent role in organizational change--as champions for change and as key players in its implementation. This study seeks to understand why public managers choose to support change and initiate it within their organizations. A model of change-related attitude and behavior is developed and tested in the study. The results indicate that a complex pattern of internal and external factors influence a public managers attitude and behavior relating to change. The results also suggest that top-down and bottom-up drivers of change work simultaneously to influence a public managers decision to assume the role of a change agent.

Exploring Variations in Contracting for Services Among American Local Governments: Do Politics Still Matter?

During the previous two decades, researchers have conducted an array of empirical studies of local government contracting for services. Some of the more recent findings have suggested that this form of privatization has become less politically controversial and more accepted as a service delivery approach. Do politics still matter when it comes to explaining patterns in local government contracting? The findings from this study indicate that the influence of political factors, such as demand for smaller government and public employee opposition to privatization, still help to account for variations in local government contracting, as they did during the 1980s and early 1990s. Contract management capacity is an important determinant of local government contracting.

Examining the Effects of Leadership Behavior on Employee Perceptions of Performance and Job Satisfaction

Studies undertaken at Ohio State University and the University of Michigan nearly five decades ago identified two broad categories of effective leadership behavior: task-oriented and relations-oriented behavior. More recently, scholars from Scandinavia identified a third category of behavior associated with effective leadership: development-oriented leadership. This study measures these three types of leadership behavior and analyzes their relation to perceptions of performance and job satisfaction as reported by federal employees responding to the 2002 Federal Human Capital Survey. The results show that all three types of leadership behavior are positively related to perceptions of performance, while relations-oriented and development-oriented behavior are positively related to job satisfaction. In short, leadership behavior matters when it comes to predicting perceived performance and job satisfaction.

Government Contracts With Private Organizations Are There Differences Between Nonprofits and For-profits?

In this empirical study, we examine whether systematic differences exist between government contracts with nonprofit and for-profit service providers. Based on principal–agent theory, we examine the potential comparative advantage of nonprofit organizations over for-profits in two areas: contracting process and contract performance. We test hypotheses using data from a national survey of local government contracts with private service providers. The results provide some support for the propositions that public officials trust nonprofits more than for-profits and grant them additional discretion. Even stronger support is found for the propositions that nonprofits are monitored less than for-profits and are awarded contracts of longer duration and for services characterized by higher levels of task uncertainty than those awarded to their for-profit counterparts. We find no significant differences in performance between nonprofit and for-profit contractors in terms of cost, quality of work, responsiveness to government requirements, legal compliance, or customer satisfaction.

Employee Empowerment and Turnover Intention in the U.S. Federal Bureaucracy

Reducing employee turnover in the U.S. federal government has been an ongoing goal of policymakers in Washington, D.C. A large literature emerging during the last three decades has identified a range of antecedents of turnover intention and actual turnover, including individual characteristics, employee attitudes, organizational conditions, and managerial practices. Little research has been done, however, on the impact of employee empowerment as a multifaceted managerial approach on turnover options in the public sector. This study proposes a theoretical model of the direct and indirect effects of employee empowerment on turnover intention in the U.S. federal bureaucracy. The model is tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) and data from the U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS). The empirical results support the hypothesized model. Employee empowerment has negative direct and indirect effects on turnover intention. In addition, the negative effect is greater on the likelihood of intention to leave to another federal agency and intention to leave the federal government than on the intention to retire.

The State of Public Management Research: An Analysis of Scope and Methodology

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the state of public management research, specifically focusing on the scope of research and variety of methodologies pursued in the field. We use a sample of manuscripts from three successive meetings of the Public Management Research Association to explore these issues. Our analysis is organized along four themes that have been central to public managements identity as a field of research: (1) the link between theory and practice; (2) focus on prescription and performance; (3) debate over empirical and nonempirical approaches; and (4) preferences for quantitative or qualitative data. We find that public management research has not yet bridged the gap between theory and practice, although substantive areas of research appear to reflect current trends in the public sector. There is moderate but slightly declining interest in performance. Empirical methods appear to be the norm, with an even mix of qualitative and quantitative data.